A by-invitation group blog for busy authors of SFR, Futuristic, or Paranormal romances in which at least one protagonist is an alien, or of alien ancestry.

Sunday, July 02, 2017

In Praise Of Canada And Europe

In honour of the Fourth of July, this poster assumes that American readers are enjoying time offline, and not worrying about all things copyright-related, but our friends in Europe and Canada are not celebrating anything special.

Musicians, authors, photographers and other copyright holders are celebrating the wisdom and foresight of the Supreme Court of Canada for ordering the worldwide de-indexing of copyright-infringing websites!

That means, not only must infringing individual links be removed, but entire pirate sites must be removed from search indexing. Moreover, that order does not just apply to search results provided on dot ca sites

The Trichordist piles on with a music-related analysis of how much in dollar terms one band allegedly suffers --and conversely a search engine and host of a site that allegedly monetizes copyright infringing music video content-- allegedly saves itself in royalties when the search engine promotes the USG version instead of showing the link to the official video that pays royalties to the musicians and songwriter.

They explain that the District Court in the Hague decided that the interests of the copyright owners (who create the valuable content) are more important than the interests of "traders" and middlemen and internet service providers. (Perhaps we can now add "search engines" to the list?)

While internet service providers have a right to do business, but that does not outweigh their obligation to help put a stop to copyright infringement. Internet service providers may be forced by the courts to provide details of would-be anonymous infringers.

Remember, in Europe at least, "copyright" is accepted as "a human right".

For any alien romance authors (or any other genre of authors) thinking of setting up a website, and who have an hour to spare in the interests of learning how to avail themselves of safe harbour protections under the DMCA, Fenwick & West LLP have a webinar.